First, we affirm the necessity of Israel taking decisive action to defend its civilian population from Hezbollah's rockets and to respond to the unprovoked abduction of its soldiers. War is always at least heck, but sometimes it's a lesser heck than letting a whole nation of people be overrun by bad guys.
Second, we grieve the considerable collateral damage that warfare creates, especially when one side uses civilians and UN "peacekeepers" as crude shields for propaganda advantage. In the best of wars, the innocent suffer, and it's not best when one side deliberately holes up in crowded urban neighborhoods so that they can represent the other side's actions as targeting of civilians. We wish that there was as much grief for Hezbollah's deliberate targeting of civilians with their dumb rockets, for which they celebrate almost hourly, as there is for Israel's collateral damage (admittedly a term that minimizes the real human effect) to civilians with their smart weapons, for which they apologize (admittedly words only) almost daily. Of course, the double standard that assumes the Islamist side are savages who can't be held to moral account and so all blame belongs to Israel and America is so embedded into the discourse on this issue, one can hardly expect otherwise.
Third, we note that this series of events has exposed again the utter fecklessness of the UN and the current Democrat Party leadership on such matters. On this we defer to the ever-clever James Taranto (see his first two entries), who rightly skewers the Ds' fake umbrage at Iraqi President al-Maliki's tepid objection to Israeli actions and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's patently false accusation that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting UN observers.
Update: Not suprisingly, no one has expressed all this better than psychiatrist and pundit Charles Krauthammer. A quotation:
The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.
In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.
But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.
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